Microsoft shipped 2 mllion copies of Windows Phone 7

John Cox |
Jan. 27, 2011

A Microsoft executive said this week the company shipped more than 2 million copies of its revamped operating system, Windows Phone 7, in the most recent quarter. The careful admission at once triggered another spasm of misconstrued, misinterpreted, mistaken, and misanthropic speculation on the success or failure of Microsoft's smartphone platform.

FRAMINGHAM, 27 JANUARY 2011 - A Microsoft executive said this week the company shipped more than 2 million copies of its revamped operating system, Windows Phone 7, in the most recent quarter. The careful admission at once triggered another spasm of misconstrued, misinterpreted, mistaken, and misanthropic speculation on the success or failure of Microsoft's (MSFT) smartphone platform.

The same executive, Greg Sullivan, a senior product manager at Microsoft, in a story reported by Bloomberg, cited results of Microsoft's internal surveys of customer satisfaction and brand awareness. "Customer satisfaction for the product is at 93% and brand awareness has jumped 22 points to 66% since it was released," the story reported.

Redmond Pie's headline was misleading on two counts, conflating OS shipments with phone retail sales, and the time frame: "Microsoft Sold Over 2 Million Windows Phone 7 Handsets Since Launch." WinRumors: "Microsoft has now shipped 2 million Windows Phone 7 devices."

The new round of confusion mirrors that in December, when Microsoft carefully said that handset manufacturers had sold 1.5 million Windows Phone 7 handsets ... to mobile carriers. At the time, Business Insider's Dan Frommer opined that "Windows Phone 7 is toast."

Microsoft won't sell many Windows Phone handsets, he wrote "Why not? Because there simply aren't many reasons for anyone to buy a Windows Phone instead of an iPhone or an Android device."

Microsoft clearly is trying to avoid direct comparison, at least for now, with the stated retail sales figures for Google's (GOOG) Android and Apple's iOS devices. Bloomberg reported that Apple (AAPL) sold 16.2 million iPhones alone in its most recent quarter. (And the iOS platform has become the main driver of Apple's profitability, according to an analysis by Asymco's Horace Dediu. Since being introduced in the first iPhone in 2007, today "iOS powers about 70% of Apple's current gross profits," Dediu writes.)